WOW! Free Image Resizing!

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You saw me ranting earlier about Image Resizing On The Fly and how it may change the way we interact with images. Until now, though, we never got the chance to sample the technology. Thanks to rsizr, now you can use the Seam Carving Technology to resize and alter your own images. Want to remove a person from the last vacation pics? Here's your answer...

Here's what the people behind rsizr say about the service:

rsizr is a Flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images on your computer. With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.

To get an idea on what Seam Carving is, check the link in the first paragraph of this post. rsizr is still in public beta, so there are bound to be some bugs. Get the early mover advantage and you might even be able to suggest some other cool features the team can add to the service! BTW, Dreamhost couldn't have asked for better advertising

Sample resized picture:

Original -

Resized -

Other blogs who mentioned rsizr recently:

Rsizr: Groundbreaking Image Editor with "Seam Carving" at Mashable

Seam Carving co-inventor hired by Adobe

Double Wow - Sooner than you think...

It's rare for someone to be posting back-to-back about the same item when the posts are both inspired by the same blog (Ahem!).

My last post about Image Resizing was inspired by this post on TechCrunch and the current post is inspired by this one on TC again. I don't mean to plagiarize Mike's posts, but I can't hide my excitement as I learn that the co-inventor of the Image resizing technology, Shai Avidan, has been hired by Adobe.

I now wonder if some other image processing company is planning to hire Dr. Ariel Shamir and get him to compete with his co-inventor in the image processing market. Capitalism has its benefits :)

WOW! Image resizing on the fly - Seam Carving

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Every once in a while there comes a service that really helps all of us in a big way. Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing is one such service. The patent is held by Dr Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science and the service revolves around finding horizontal and vertical seams that can be removed/added to resize images. The video below will give you a 'better picture' of how exactly it happens in real time.

Dr. Ariel Shamir's Home Page will give you a detailed description on how it's done. The technique is impressive and comes at a time when most of us thought of image editing as a plain vanilla service. On a related note, it's interesting to imagine how this may change things in the future. For one, it'll give copyrighting a whole new definition as pictures can be easily altered to remove content (and thereby creating totally new images).

Comments on TechCrunch also talk about editing music files, videos and even text to fit the browser in your desktop or handheld device.

All in all, it will be interesting to see how this service gets integrated into some of the more well-known photo editing softwares (like Photoshop) and whether the technology can be borrowed into resizing our videos.